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Linux Software

Two Shots In The Arm For PPC Linux 162

Posted by timothy from the sore-arm dept.
pinqkandi writes: "SuSE Linux 7.3 PowerPC Edition has now gone into distribution. New for this version are more USB drivers, and improved memory management, among other things. It is now based on Kernel 2.4.12 and glibc 2.2.4. For $79.95 you get it and 2000+ apps on 8 CDs, 550 pages of documentation, and 60 days of tech support." Read on for another nice turn for PPC users with an itch for Free software.

If updated PPC distributions interest you, this might too: DocTomoe writes: "The staff at iMacLinux have put together one of the largest PowerPC specific Linux resources. The new site called TuxPPC covers all PowerPC hardware. The site is aimed at not just people with Macs who want to try Linux, but at Linux users who might be interested in getting into the PowerPC platform."guides and web forums, too.

So when will Mandrake release 8.1 for PPC?
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Two Shots In The Arm For PPC Linux More

Two Shots In The Arm For PPC Linux

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  • I am now struggling with Mandrake8.0, I might as well try SuSE again.

    I had loads of trouble with Yast2, maybe the kinks are out of it by now.
  • I just might get it, and update it ASAP.

    I just have to remember not to shut it down or unmount any drives.

    (just kidding)

    Honestly tho, MOL (mac on linux) sounds just like classic...or am I off base?

    • Re:Excellent news. (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      MOL is more like VMWare, but is very similar to classic, yes. [vmware.com]
      • MOL is more like Classic which is more like Win4Lin - they are all software emulation and not hardware emulation; they are not virtual machines like VMware.
        • MoL sets up a full virtual machine, using the PPC's self-virtualization capability. AFAIK Win4Lin is the same sort of situation. Classic, OTOH, shares filesystem and display (and other device) access so that everything can run together, I'm guessing using some sort of QuickDraw trickery.

          So MoL is much more similar to VMWare. VMWare does use the host CPU to run what it can natively, like MoL does, unlike say, Bochs, where everything is emulated.
  • SuSE and Mandrake a very nice distros, but I would still like to see Slackware or Debian for PPC. There are a lot of older pre G3 Macs out there that aren't exactly speed machines by today's standards. Of course there is always BSD...

    • Re:Other Distros (Score:4, Informative)

      by Carrot007 ( 37198 ) on Saturday November 24, 2001 @06:02PM (#2608185)

      is this a figment of my imagination then?

      http://www.debian.org/ports/powerpc/

      Carrot007.

    • Re:Other Distros (Score:2, Informative)

      by macinslak ( 41252 )
      Debian for PPC has been around for a while. Installation is not pleasant of course, but it does work quite nicely on my old 603/200.

    • Re:Other Distros (Score:2, Interesting)

      by alexandre ( 53 )
      Debian is available, i m running it right now on a TiBook and i must say i'm impressed.

      All the hardware is supported, and i mean all!

      USB mouse with wheel...
      sound hardware..
      DRI support..
      (well cant try firewire but ... )

    • Re:Other Distros (Score:4, Informative)

      by GiMP ( 10923 ) on Saturday November 24, 2001 @06:34PM (#2608285)
      I have debian running on my G3 Pismo (firewire) powerbook. It is great! I also have a 7100/80 I just aquired and plan to install mkLinux on.

      I wouldn't suggest anything but debian for any platform, except maybe slack.. but that doesn't run on PowerPC out of the box :)

      And no, installation of debian onto a PowerPC machine wasn't any harder then installing onto an X86 box. I did have a little learning curve when I had to learn the differences between how bootloaders work on newer Macs and X86..

      Newer Macs use OpenFirmware, x86 has a bios and boot records, other PowerPC machines use Prep or Chrp, etc.. But that is an expected pitfall when moving to any new platform.
    • After I got sick of trying to get Polish locale to work in MacOS X, I decided to go with Linux on my TiBook.

      Tried Mandrake, LinuxPPC, Suse and Debian.

      Mandrake was easy to install, but a nightmare in maintenance (rpm craziness).

      LinuxPPC and Suse just didn't seem right, since I'm a BSD freak. Debian suited me best. It's well organized, clear and simple. With apt-get I'm always up to date with PPC packages. Installation is only a tiny bit trickier than on a PC.
    • There is a Debian PPC port. Check out:

      http://www.debian.org/ports/

      BTW, I'm a Mandrake user. :)

  • Try Yellowdog (Score:4, Informative)

    by Improv ( 2467 ) <pgunn01@gmail.com> on Saturday November 24, 2001 @05:57PM (#2608169) Homepage Journal
    I recently installed YDL 2.1 [yellowdoglinux.com] on my iBook. I've been overall pretty happy with the distribution. It has its high points (nice software included) and its low points (installer didn't install yaboot properly, I had to fix it myself). I'd recommend it to anyone wanting to run Linux on their Mac...
    • Does anyone have any experience with the different ditros available for PPC? I have an old 7600 with a G3 in it. I used to run LinuxPPC 2000 on it and I am looking to turn it into a Linux box again. I am planning on going with YDL 2.1, but am curious about other distributions.

      -Joe
    • (installer didn't install yaboot properly, I had to fix it myself). I'd recommend it to anyone wanting to run Linux on their Mac...

      Well, except for people who who can't fix yaboot, right?

      • Hehe. Yeah.
        Actually, the thing it did was, yaboot needs a
        HFS partition to install the bootloader on,
        and their installer doesn't check to make sure
        that that partition is formatted before it runs
        ybin (yaboot installer) on it. ybin gives an
        error, but the installer doesn't notice, and says
        that everything is fine. Oh well. It might've had
        to do with my making the partitions (but not
        formatting them) in a previous install attempt,
        instead of making them in that go.
    • I'm typing this from a TiBook running YDL2.1. I've had a bit of trouble with it. For one, it didn't recognize the CD-ROM during install (but there is a hint on what to do about that at the ydl site).

      Second, the trackpad didn't work after a wake-up it confused the vertical with horizontal and acted all jittery. Thankfully, I found a patch and managed to build a working pmud RPM with it.

      Then, CD-ROM again -- it just didn't want to work in the IDE mode. Oddly, this got fixed when loading it as ide-scsi (had to MAKEDEV sr).

      My biggest "aarhg!" was when I tried ext3 and after a couple of reboots I lost my partitions. Not sure whether it's their ext3 patches to blame, but it's my biggest suspicion so far.

      One reinstall later and after deciding not to touch ext3 on this kernel any more (2.4.10 with a bunch of patches), I tackled the biggest problem -- they shipped it with Gnome 1.2.1! (I don't like KDE, oh, and the KDE 2.2.1 version they shipped has a broken soundserver on PPC. I think they knew that when they shipped it). So, I managed to rebuild most packages from the Ximian-gnome install that the Monkey-people have for YDL2.0. Some packages I had to borrow from Red Hat Linux SRPM's -- surprisingly most of them rebuild for PPC quite nicely.

      So, after about a week of playing with it, I have a working Linux/Gnome install with the latest goodies from Ximian like Evo RC2... But, unless you're familiar with Linux and like hacking, don't try YDL 2.1 on TiBooks yet. It's... not polished to the stage where it's a reliable distro.

      Can't say anything about SuSE -- haven't touched the stuff in about a year.
    • I'm going to agree with YDL being good. I've got 2.1 on a G4 with MOL doing the majority of our appletalk serving and the other network services running on the native linux side. It's really quite nice (MOL is amazing after dealing with VMWare on x86), and seems better put together than LinuxPPC's distro. I've never tried SuSE/Debian on PPC - they already run our x86's and variety makes life more entertaining. :)
  • I my e-mail, tomcat, ssh, and ftp servers using YellowDog on a headless G4 450. It is by far my favorite distro (including any for the i386).

  • AS/400 (iSeries) Support Too ! (Score:5, Informative)

    by DigitalDreg ( 206095 ) on Saturday November 24, 2001 @06:04PM (#2608193)
    Remember folks, this just isn't for Macs - it runs on big iron too!

    For those of you who are utterly confused - this Suse distribution also runs on IBM's AS/400 (new name is iSeries). Yes, you too can have good old RPG (not "role playing game"!) and COBOL apps running side by side with Linux.
  • Hehe, I needed a dedicated dialup router/gateway for my home network and when I saw SuSE released 7.3 for PowerPC I bought a Performa 6400/180 on Ebay the next day. When all shipping and handling for both items were taken into account, SuSE still costs more than the computer!, but it is well worth it. SuSE 7.3 is an awesome platform, especially mixed with PowerPC. I can't wait for the G5's to come out, but if anyone out there is lucky enough to already have PPC64 hardware check out www.linuxppc64.org.
  • hey

    YDL worked pretty well the others(SUSE Mandrake ) didnt even boot on my brand spanking new iMac

    the problem ?
    they did not know what to do with a blank disk
    (dumb but shows how much REAL testing they did)

    my only complaint with YDL was the fact that libm was not actually where it should be

    I was running specCPU2000 and it would not compile !

    so I recomend that YDL at least put the link in (-;

    cheers

    john jones

  • Two shots in the ARM? (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Two shots in the ARM? I thought this was about PowerPC.....

  • PPC (Score:4, Funny)

    by Elbereth ( 58257 ) on Saturday November 24, 2001 @06:35PM (#2608291) Journal
    Yeah, so where do I buy a PPC motherboard and CPU?

    • Re:PPC (Score:4, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 24, 2001 @06:50PM (#2608332)

      I think Apple sells them. They come with a lot of extra stuff, though.

    • Here [apple.com] or here [terrasoftsolutions.com]
    • At the Apple Store [apple.com]. And you get a nice case, hd, dvd drive, or cd or dvd burner and a bunch of other nice stuff.

    • Re:PPC (Score:2, Informative)

      by SuzanneA ( 526699 )
      As others have suggested, there is apple :), but you also have a choice of a few Single Board Computer (SBC) vendors that sell PPC boards designed to run linux.

      While a SBC doesn't seem a logical choice for a desktop, it does have some nice advantages. Most SBCs contain a fairly reasonable set of desktop-like components, such as 100baseT, 3d video, AC97 audio, etc.

      An interesting thought is whether you could get a ETX/EBX format SBC card into the old shoebox size Sun cases. Though they would also fit into an external 5.25" SCSI enclosure with a little work, that would be fun too.

    • For a while, there was a community project to build PPC-based motherboards from IBM's "open" reference platform known as PowerPC Open Platform, or "POP". Ralph Giles started a mailing list (recently moved to opencores.org [opencores.org]), and I built up a Web site at openppc.org. In addition, I created a [openppc.org] commercial company [popcomputers.com] to produce the boards. (These sites may be temporarily down -- our data center has had some power problems over the past two days.)

      Then, IBM had problems with the new Northbridge design they specified for the board. Not wanting to release a flawed design to the world, they decided not to make the layout files ("Gerbers") available. With only schematics, lack of support from IBM, and waning confidence in the community, the project eventually fizzled.

      Sic sic transit gloria PPC.

  • I don't know if this happens with other browsers/OSes (I can only get to a windows box now), but IE (5.5) has MAJOR problems with that site. The page is wide as hell (we're talking a few 1000x the screen width), and the header and footer cells in the table are too tall too. I'm sure this is IE, becase no one in their right mind would make a site look like that unless it was a prank. Hope they fix this soon.
    • It is IE 5.5. It does the same thing on my machine here, while Mozilla 0.9.6 renders it just fine. Also works fine on IE5 for the Mac.

  • Tech support of SuSE (Score:2, Informative)

    by phreakinb ( 248975 )
    I recently bought SuSE 7.3.. I tried to get tech support one night and i got a recording "Tech support is only open from 7-11 PST" or something like that.. Really early for most folks, or people that goto school. But theyt do have different hours on weekends, wich is a plus.
  • Well, I'm getting me a PowerPC to tinker with (I bought it a few days ago, and I'm waiting for it to ship here) and have been trying to decide ona distro..

    Yellow Dog is the most commonly mentioned, Debian seems promising, but there's also MkLinux... Does anyone know anything about this? It's Linux based on a mach kernel, and was the original linux for Mac's. Now, I found it, thought it looked interesting (mmm... get to play around with mach... mmmm...) but according to TuxPPC the distro is Believed to be obsolete and unmaintained.

    Now, I can't currently connect to the ftp server to check the date on the files to see how old they are, but the news is out of date, so that isn't looking too promising. The web page however, has been updated recently (21/11/2001 to be exact)

    So, my questions are: Does anyone know anythign about MkLinux? when was the source last updated? Is it any good? Anything at all?
    • MkLinux was actually developed by Apple (in conjunction with some European academic group, don't remember who), back in the Amelio era. Itself, it was never very popular, but the code release allowed people to start building monolithic linux kernels on PPC Macs, and the assorted Mac Linux distros followed on shortly after.

      Right now, the only reason to use MkLinux is if you want to run linux on one of the original powermacs: the 6100, 7100 and 8100. MkLinux is the only linux which supports booting on NuBus (non-PCI) based Macs, and is maintained for that reason only.
    • MkLinux was aimed mostly at pre-PCI systems, where a native kernel wasn't available. There is an alternative [sf.net] now, and with the fact that (to my knowledge) MkLinux is unfathomably outdated, there's really no excuse to use it at this point. Certainly not on a PCI PowerMac, but even on the NuBus systems, you may as well use native kernels.
  • I've been using yellow dog 2.1 for a couple of weeks now on a beige G3... it's nice, and at the least it runs much faster then OS 10.1 did after i jacked it in.

    But I am loving SuSE 7.3 for Intel. it's tight, polished and stable as a mountain. everything works (except the usb wheelmouse thing, which i am sure i can fix when i get around to it) and more importantly, it lets me get work done. If i want to futz and play I'll load into Progeny Debian or Woody.

    So anyway, my point is: if you want to use your OS for work and not Work on your OS I'd fly with SuSE and personally i can't wait to pick up a copy and slap it on my Macs, all of them actually.

    one more point, if you are insane and install everything it's like 5.4 gigs of data, SuSE 7.3 includes a bootable DVD-ROM and man, that just freaking rocks as well... is there also going to be one for the PPC version?
  • Why in the world would someone want to go to the trouble of installing Linux on a weird architecture when they have the awesome UNIX power of OSX available to them? I mean, if I had any nice PPC hardware, I would be running OSX. Oh well, I guess there are just masochists in every group...
    • That I can tell you in one word: Performance. I have a rev. A iMac. 233 MHz G3, 160 MB RAM. Plenty of horsepower for Linux, but MacOS X just crawls on its belly and begs for mercy.

      SuSE 7.3 PPC is on my Christmas wish list.

      "But I just got you SuSE 7.3 IA32 for your birthday!" -my long-suffering wife
      • Yes, that's all well and good that it runs faster than OSX, but the question is, what do you do with it? I mean, with the availability of a huge number of quality applications for OSX (like Office XP over, oh c'mon, StarOffice) should make it infinitly more attractive. It isn't even decent for web surfing, I can't even get Konquerer to render a lot of web pages right, let alone a slow mess of code like Mozilla, while on OSX the latest version of Internet Explorer (which, when I last checked, still rendered every page I have visited correctly, which is what makes it superior, because everyone designs around it) is available for free.

        I suppose you could some kind of budget artist like timothy, in which case you would be using GIMP in preference to pricy Photoshop, but other than that, I can't fathom why you'd do it.

      • While I definitely understand why using OS X may simply not be an option on older machines (which I always find amazing, since OPENSTEP ran on 33 MHz machines with 32 MB RAM just fine), Linux to me doesn't make any sense on any computer where Darwin is supported. With Darwin, you get the Unix, you get the X window support, but you also get drivers for a slew of peripherals, you get an easier install than any Linux, you get, by definition, essentially perfect support for the Apple motherboards, you get flawless HFS/HFS+ and AppleTalk support built-in, you get the ability to tie in easily with a NetInfo network, etc., and the requirements for Darwin are just as low as LinuxPPC, as near as I can tell. PPC Linux has in my mind shifted as the solution only where someone either insists on Linux for whatever reason, or where hardware is old enough that Darwin doesn't support it. (And with Darwin now supporting pretty much all PCI Macs, that area is dwindling.) I am being completely serious when I ask, is there any reason to use Linux over Darwin in a case where both are supported, other than you "just want to use Linux"? (I even run Linux under the latter excuse, and enjoy it, so this is not Linux bashing. It's just that if I wanted to set up a production server, there's no compelling reason I've found where Linux on my system greatly outpeforms Darwin, or the opposite, for that matter. They both are very similar except when I want to do things such as add a user, at which point on one system I use traditional Unix tools and on the other I use NetInfo.) I am sure there are some reasons to use Linux over Darwin; I just don't know what they are, which is why I'm asking.
    • At least, that's a sufficient answer to me, and the biggest easily-identifiable reason I'm waiting impatiently for mdk8.1 :) I have photoshop LE (came with a Wacom tablet), and it's OK, but after using both I prefer GIMP's interface in general for my personal photo manipulation and drawing. Both have good and bad points, and Sure, I'm just more used to GIMP after not touching PS for a few years, but hey. YMMV, etc.

      For people who a) like or need IRC and b) prefer free software to shareware / guiltware / payware, xchat is also quite nice to have, though Mozilla's IRC capabilities are getting quite nice. (private msg's are handled much better by xchat, though.)

      OS X is nice looking, though, now that I bumped up the RAM in my iBook ;)

      timothy
      • Umm...I don't think the GIMP [macgimp.org] is a reason to use LinuxPPC instead of OS X.

        If it runs on *BSD/ppc, either it runs on OS X now, or it will soon.
        • I rarely add software to an installation of Mandrake or Red Hat, and were I a SuSE user I could probably add an "extremely" before the "rarely." Even the smaller, downloadable all-GPL version of mandrake has most of the software that I want / need on a daily basis. (Except for upgrading certain things, grabbing a new Mozilla once in a while, etc.)

          To get gimp to run on OS X (it runs, Yes ...) is a larger pain than installing a simple Linux system, and does me no good when using OS 9, anyhow. (For speed reasons, even with 10.1 and 384 megs of memory, I find myself usually booting that machine into OS 9.)

          But you're right, I wasn't thinking about macgimp when I wrote that.

          timothy
      • The GIMP runs rootlessly on Mac OS X. (Install using fink [sourceforge.net] or gnu-darwin [sourceforge.net].) I bet getting xchat to work wouldn't be too much of a chore.

        BTW, I agree that on older machines Linux is much, much faster (I have a server running LinuxPPC)
      • For people who a) like or need IRC and b) prefer free software to shareware / guiltware / payware, xchat is also quite nice to have, though Mozilla's IRC capabilities are getting quite nice. (private msg's are handled much better by xchat, though.)

        Actually, if I recall correctly, BitchX [bitchx.org] is available for OSX [macosx.org]. BitchX being free and all, you would probably agree that it is worth using.

        Also, why are you so opposed to paying for software that people have obviously put a lot of effort into? If I really felt like editing images and being a digital artist in general, I would go out an shell out cash for Photoshop. Isn't it kind of hypocritical to diss commercial software on this site and then go off and offer people "subscriptions" to Slashdot, which you and the other editors have obviously worked (kind of) very hard on?

        • re: bitchX -- though a lot of people swear by bitchX, to me it's at best a distant 3rd behind xchat and mozilla's IRC mode. So it's no argument for me, really, on that count. Using the nicely cross-platform Mozilla (on borrowed Windows machines, my Linux-running desktops or my iBook running Mac OS) isn't exactly a terrible hardship, and that module seems to improve faster even than the rest of Mozilla, but it's just not my favorite.

          re: Paying for software -- never said I was opposed to paying for software, only that I prefer Free software to the other kinds. Paying for (or just using) Free software seems a better long-term investment to me than paying for (or just using) the other kinds. I prefer not to spend more money than I have to (doesn't everyone?), and I like software with available source, in part because that means there's no reason it has to disappear if / when its vendor disappears.

          (Did you ever use the word processor called "WriteNow"? Clean, fast, fit on 2 floppies ... if the source was open, I might be using a modern descendent of that program today.)

          I can diss any software I want :) Most software sucks. Mozilla crashes sometimes, and that's my most-days, most-hours window on the world. No Free *nix desktop handles fonts with anything like the panache of Mac OS. More generally, most user interfaces (not just software, or computers -- think of the user interface of everything from buying an airline ticket to car radios) are horrible. Sometimes software has problems that come from being proprietary (security problems that don't get fixed for a long time because of a ponderous review and fix cycle, say), but software problems come in all varieties, and any non-trivial program probably has bugs worth crying about.

          With Photoshop vs GIMP specifically, like I said before, I prefer GIMP, and it runs under Linux, my preferred OS for right now. PS runs on my laptop, and I have a paid-for (limited version) copy on there. If you don't prefer GIMP, and want to shell out the money for a full version of PS, well, great, no problem! I'm sure the PS coders are bright guys and earn the salaries they're paid. In certain applications, PS is currently a better choice; those just aren't the ones I have. (No 4-color printing, for instance.) I do wish for better text-handling in GIMP, it's true, but we choose different bundles all the time, and my font complaints don't overshadow my general preferences.

          Cheers,

          timothy
    • I've been using OS X as my get-my-work-done OS for several months now, and although I'm fairly happy with it, I can see some good reasons to put Linux on it as well. Although it's true that a lot of Linux software is getting ported, not everything has been, and installing X-windows is reputed to be a pretty scary task. I've done a teensy bit of porting myself, and even with programs that have no GUI, it wasn't exactly trivial. F'rinstance, people write these makefiles for use with gnumake and GNU's autoconfiguration stuff, and it doesn't just compile without modification. I'm not saying it would be difficult for a stouthearted Linuxite, but for us ordinary mortals, it's a real obstacle. And do you really want to have to recompile that software every time there's a new release?


      I'm also pretty frustrated with finding peripherals that work with X. I'm now the proud owner of two printers and two CD burners, none of which work with X.1.1. So actually I'm not convinced that support for peripherals is better with MacOS X than with Linux. There are lots of peripherals that say on the box they're Mac-compatible, and that Apple says are Mac-compatible, but if you try them, ... uh ..., they don't work in X. And SCSI support in X is virtually nonexistent. At least the Linux community hasn't bought into this philosophy that any peripheral more than 6 months old is a "legacy."


      I hate to say it, but I feel like I need to pay MS for a Windows license just in order to be released from Peripheral Hell. I don't really want to have to have Windows, PPC Linux, and OS X all running under my roof, but it almost seems like I have to...

      • uhh...try gmake

      • A pretty thorough guide for OS X peripheral compatibility lives on Apple's site, which should come as no surprise.

        From the Apple homepage, click on Made4Mac; this will take you to a searchable index of 3rd party product, both software and hardware. It also lists if said product is compatible with X.
        • Thanks for the info! Here's a good example, though. I looked there for a CD-R drive compatible with OS X. They listed exactly two:
          • LaCie Dupli 125 -- seems to be vaporware, since searching for "dupli 125" on LaCie's web page doesn't give any results
          • Axonix SuperCD -- exists, but looks like a gigantic model for commercial disk pressing


    • Because Linux is cheap, flexible and gives total control to the user.
    • I love MacOS X. It's beautiful, functional and generally the best OS I've ever used.

      However, it doesn't support Polish fonts nor locale. Ineed to write Polish text with proper national characters. After a few months of hacking and struggling with MacOS I installed Linux, which turned out to be a better sollution for me.
    • because osx only runs on imac or later(better),
      thus, my old ppcs can't or won't run the windows like bloat of OSX. It is a beautiful gui, and I got great pleasure ssh-ing into my isps linux servers and ntalking to my friends from a G4, I did require a shower afterwards though... :}
    • And you'll see exactly why Linux is useful for the Mac.

      MacOS X is more-or-less unusable on this machine.

      I know RAM is cheap these days, but my Rev. A iMac uses some god-awful half-size RAM SIMMs, which are expensive and hard to find.

      I run Mandrake 8.0 on the iMac, and with KDE it seems pretty sluggish (starting apps, general performance), but WindowMaker is very usable and GNOME is faster too.
    • Because recent security problems(like getting a root shell just by opening two programs in sequence) really don't cut the mustard.

      I use MandrakePPC 8.0 for all our servers(we run a small ISP) and I use MacOS 9 for all my get-on-with-work stuff like Word, Excel,etc.

      BTW, running single user mode should NOT give me root access without a password!
  • My biggest question is this: does SuSE 7.3 PPC support sound on the iBook? I'm using Mandrake Linux 8.0 now, and it's decent, but I have no sound. This is most unfortunate when I'm trying to work and I can't listen to MP3s. Yellow Dog Linux 2.1 is supposed to have sound support, but the installation discs wouldn't mount in my CD/DVD drive. I haven't tried Linux/PPC, so I have no clue in that arena.

    It would also be nice to be able to underclock my processor like in MacOS so that the battery lasts longer, monitor the battery life with software, and play DVDs. Hopefully, when I have more time, I will help others resolve these issues. I've heard rumors of an iBook Linux distro, and there's a page at SourceForge, but I can't confirm this.
    • My biggest question is this: does SuSE 7.3 PPC support sound on the iBook?

      Sound works great on my Powerbook G3 400 ("Pismo") - actually better than in MacOS9, since I can use BOTH speakers and external sound at the same time if I want to. (And I control volume of speakers and external independently)

  • What about those of us who paid $50 only one year ago for SuSE 7/PPC? I still have to pay $50? Rediculous. This is open source software, not Windows. By the way, the tech support is crap, they wont support anything that comes off the cds. I asked for help with the default sendmail installation and they wouldn't help me because it was not a SuSE product, what part of their OS is made by SuSE? None of it.

    Every package that comes with SuSE PPC is broken, I ended up recompiling everything that I chose in the installer by hand.

    Not to say that I don't like SuSE, but they need to fix some things.
  • Though I have used Suse in the past, one thing that really starts to grate is the expense. If they would offer a stripped down cheaper version like RedHat, then I would be likely to give this a try but until that time.......I don't really need a jillion CD's worth of apps.
  • Anyone know if this distro will boot on the white 867MHz G4? Couldn't get LinuxPPC 2kQ4 to boot on this damn thing. :)

  • Mandrake PPC (Score:4, Interesting)

    by _hAZE_ ( 20054 ) on Saturday November 24, 2001 @09:48PM (#2608768)
    Mandrake is currently working on updating their PPC tree. I believe they are going to skip an 8.1 release and focus on an 8.2 release that will (hopefully) coincide with their i586 8.2 release. Testing is open to the public (like all Mandrake releases), you can download the tree from most Mandrake development FTP mirrors. They also have a mailing list that you can subscribe to for those interested in running the PPC port. Check out http://www.linux-mandrake.com/en/fdevlists.php3 for the mailing list and http://www.linux-mandrake.com/en/cookerdevel.php3 for information on downloading the development tree.
  • I used to use LinuxPPC. It was easy to install and meant that getting a small 7200 up and running with apache, proftpd and so on was easy (this was our office's first foray into Linux 2 years ago - now we have our main servers all running Linux). However, as a newbie, I found it difficult to upgrade the system sensibly.

    Now our office runs Debian potato on our VALinux servers, and an old 7600 powermac. It is very convenient to have the same distribution running on different machines. As new or upgraded Debian packages are released simultaneously between all architectures the software realease levels of the Mac and Intel boxes is the same.

    I can recommend using Linux, particularly Debian, for older power macs. While they are no longer powerful enough for recent MacOS applications, they run very well indeed as small mail, web or ftp servers.

    When installing woody on my Lombard PowerBook, I found it fairly time consuming to get the Debian installers to work, partly as I chose to do it during a change the woody boot-floppies. However once that was sorted out, the base install and boot setup went smoothly, with some help from the extremely helpful members of the Debian PPC mailing list.

    If you don't mind spending a bit of time reading the (generally excellent) installation guide and doing the odd bit of configuration by hand, I believe you will find Debian PPC highly rewarding.
  • For those in the forefront of SuSE, when should I expect the 7.3 iso image to apear, there is currently only 7.0 and 7.1.. Did 7.2 PPC exist ? Spirit

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